Essay Assignment: Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, Between the World and Me, offers a raw assessment of the state of American race relations in the present, while looking back at the past and toward the future. How does Coates illuminate the ways in which The Dream, as he calls it, is a sham? How does his assessment compare with other Black Americans we have read, namely Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr, and James Baldwin?
In your essay, you will explore the fallacious nature of The Dream, with support from Coates’s text and three other works we have read/discussed in class. These are:
- The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- What to the slave is the Fourth of July?
- Letter from Birmingham Jail
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X
- James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew
Your essay must be at least 1,000 words (font 12, double-spaced, 1-inch margins), and all textual evidence must be cited with the page numbers. Make sure you have a clear thesis statement and a logical line of reasoning that extends throughout your paper.
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